Integrating remote sensing data assimilation, deep learning and large language model for interactive wheat breeding yield prediction

Yield is one of the core goals of crop breeding. By predicting the potential yield of different breeding materials, breeders can screen these materials at various growth stages to select the best performing. Based on unmanned aerial vehicle remote sensing technology, high-throughput crop phenotyping data in breeding areas is collected to provide data support for the breeding decisions of breeders. However, the accuracy of current yield predictions still requires improvement, and the usability and user-friendliness of yield forecasting tools remain suboptimal. To address these challenges, this study introduces a hybrid method and tool for crop yield prediction, designed to allow breeders to interactively and accurately predict wheat yield by chatting with a large language model (LLM). First, the newly designed data assimilation algorithm is used to assimilate the leaf area index into the WOFOST model. Then, selected outputs from the assimilation process, along with remote sensing inversion results, are used to drive the time-series temporal fusion transformer model for wheat yield prediction. Finally, based on this hybrid method and leveraging an LLM with retrieval augmented generation technology, we developed an interactive yield prediction Web tool that is user-friendly and supports sustainable data updates. This tool integrates multi-source data to assist breeding decision-making. This study aims to accelerate the identification of high-yield materials in the breeding process, enhance breeding efficiency, and enable more scientific and smart breeding decisions.

Multimodal large language model for wheat breeding: a new exploration of smart breeding

UAV remote sensing technology has become a key technology in crop breeding, which can achieve high-throughput and non-destructive collection of crop phenotyping data. However, the multidisciplinary nature of breeding has brought technical barriers and efficiency challenges to knowledge mining. Therefore, it is important to develop a smart breeding goal tool to mine cross-domain multimodal data. Based on different pre-trained open-source multimodal large language models (MLLMs) (e.g., Qwen-VL, InternVL, Deepseek-VL), this study used supervised fine-tuning (SFT), retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), and reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) technologies to inject cross-domain knowledge into MLLMs, thereby constructing multiple multimodal large language models for wheat breeding (WBLMs). The above WBLMs were evaluated using the newly created evaluation benchmark in this study. The results showed that the WBLM constructed using SFT, RAG and RLHF technologies and InternVL2-8B has leading performance. Then, subsequent experiments were conducted using the WBLM. Ablation experiments indicated that the combination of SFT, RAG, and RLHF technologies can improve the overall generation performance, enhance the generated quality, balance the timeliness and adaptability of the generated answer, and reduce hallucinations and biases. The WBLM performed best in wheat yield prediction using cross-domain data (remote sensing, phenotyping, weather, germplasm) simultaneously, with R2 and RMSE of 0.821 and 489.254 kg/ha, respectively. Furthermore, the WBLM can generate professional decision support answers for phenotyping estimation, environmental stress assessment, target germplasm screening, cultivation technique recommendation, and seed price query tasks.